Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous Rambling Welcome to Clean Monday. It's the Greek Orthodox Church's Ash Wednesday. So if you already botched your Lenten vows, you can kinda start over today. One was stupid, one was vapid, one was heretical: my experiences with retreats. I vowed never to do another,

> Move along, nothing to see here! https://t.co/dFhROrtLlo > — John Zmirak (@JZmirak) February 18, 2018 [https://twitter.com/JZmirak/status/965118165566050305?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] > Homosexual Vatican Judge Convicted For Possession Of Male Child Pornography https://t.co/tEwpij170Z > — gloria.tv (@gloriatv) February 17, 2018

Miscellany The Democrats created the Mexican immigration problem with their 1965 Immigration Act and by revoking (greatly restricting) the work visa program in the 1990s to make the unions happy, and now they won't give relief to the Dreamers because they don't want Trump to get

Brews You Can Use Charles H. Baker, Jr: Drink writer. I never even knew there was such a thing, outside of the pages of Modern Drunkard Magazine, but there is . . . and he wrote during the first half of the twentieth century, helping to bring to the public mind classic drinks

Kerouac, Inchausti, Beauchamp This piece brought together a lot of 2018 strands for me: "Debunking the Caricature of Jack Kerouac the Nihilist [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/debunking-the-caricature-of-jack-kerouac-the-nihilist/] ." The piece basically affirms what I taught last month at my Theology on Tap presentation: Jack Kerouac, godfather of the

Welcome to Lent 2018. Or to Valentine's Day, if that suits your disposition better. This Ash Wednesday/Valentine's Day confluence, incidentally, is great for husbands married to Catholic wives. What Catholic woman wants a lavish dinner and flowers on Valentine's Day? And what devout

Men's half-pipe is my favorite.

Lent, Zen, Other Lent neareth. Remember to eat and drink a lot tonight so tomorrow is even harder. My next Theology on Tap lecture is entitled "Zen Lent." It's an extension on my Kerouac lecture. Kerouac was a Buddhist, I guess, or at least practiced Zen